The Auerbach Will (58 page)

Joan moves slowly up the aisle. Mary closes her book. “Mrs. A?”

Essie closes her eyes. Happiness. Loneliness. Well, I did what I could do, and the rest is rainbows, dreams. On cold nights on Norfolk Street, we used to huddle against each other to keep each other warm, but that was before our friend, electricity. And there was Mr. Levy's place with the good egg creams, and there was Union Square in the springtime by the fountain. And there was Prince with his pony at The Bluff, dressed in a new white suit from Best's, but no, he does not have the pony yet, but is rolling a hoop on a sidewalk of Grand Boulevard, or is it Elberon. Papa is at the kitchen table with his books. His voice is harsh: “Can fire and water be together? Neither can godliness and Mammon.” And yet there is something in the steadfastness of his faith, a zealousness so pure that it seems carved into his face, that shines in his eyes, that Essie almost envies and wishes she could share, even a little bit of it, for herself. It is so confusing. There is a combustion of children. Jake is a shadow by her side, carrying her books through Hester Street. He will not go away. He follows her down among the paths of trillium, arbutus, maidenhair fern, lady's slipper and lily-of-the-valley in her wildflower garden, his purposeful footsteps crunching on the tanbark trails. He will not free her, even when she is free. Where shall we spend the winter, my darling, now that we're both free? The Adirondacks? We should have to melt ice from the lake for drinking water, and heat the house with log fires, and cuddle against each other at night for warmth. Do you still love me? Always. Shall we have our picnic here, in the little cove where we saw the deer? Yes.

The young steward, Jim Ulrich, whispers to Mary Farrell. “Is the old lady all right? Is she okay?”

“She's just fine,” Mary Farrell says. And, always attentive to order and detail, she places Mrs. A's cool hand gently back into the lap from which it has fallen. Jim Ulrich still looks uncertain but, with that protective, secretarial, and proprietary smile, Mary Farrell reassures him. “She's fine,” she repeats. “She's just fine.”

“We are being vectored into what is called the Liberty holding pattern,” the captain's voice says. “So-called, because our focus is the Statue of Liberty. Below, on your left, is Ellis Island, where so many immigrants arrived in the nineteenth century.…”

Outside, the night has cleared. The city glitters like the towers of fairyland, but Mary Farrell does not look out or down, and instead fixes her eyes blindly on Fodor's depiction of the Attic hills. Oh, get us home, she thinks, just get us home.

Epilogue

E
STHER
L. A
UERBACH

1892–1982

In Memoriam

Because our mother requested specifically in her will that she be given neither a funeral nor any sort of memorial service, we, her children, have each elected to write a short tribute or memory of Mother, which we hope will be shared by our own children, grandchildren, and other members of our family. The result is this small memorial pamphlet, privately printed for distribution to family and close friends. We think it is interesting to note that, when these three short pieces were collated, each of us managed to focus on a different aspect of Mother's character and personality, but perhaps this was inevitable in trying to sum up, in mere words, a complex and many-faceted human being such as Esther Auerbach.

Joan Auerbach

Babette Auerbach Stern

Martin R. “Mogie” Auerbach

JOAN:

It is very difficult for me to write of Mother because, for the rest of my life, I will have to live with the knowledge that, the night before her sudden death, she and I exchanged angry words. It doesn't matter any longer what those words were, or what we were angry about, but the fact that those words were spoken at all I shall forever regret. If a day of my life could be erased from history, that day would be it for me but, unfortunately, it cannot be. At least at the very end Mother and I had a wonderful heart-to-heart talk and were able to make our peace. This comforts me considerably.

I must also face the knowledge that, as far as the rest of the family is concerned, the single most memorable fact about my mother's and my relationship will always be that she and I did not get on. And, to be honest with myself, I must admit that this was true. I regret this, too, and in the months since her death I have struggled to figure out the reasons why it was true.

My brothers and sister used occasionally to say, or suggest, that I was jealous of Mother, and of course jealousy is not a pretty emotion to accept or admit to. But since this is being written to my brothers and sisters too, as well as to my daughter and granddaughter, I would like, if I can, to disclaim jealousy. In many ways, looking back, it seems to me, at least, that I had no cause for jealousy. In many ways, my own life was a happier one than Mother's. Her early years, growing up in New York, which she talked little about, cannot have been easy ones. And our father, when he became successful, cannot have been the easiest man to live with. Yet she lived with him for more than fifty years, and I do not ever remember hearing her complain. She had pride, and she had guts.

No, the real reason why my relationship with Mother was stormy, to say the least, was that she and I were so much alike. I was always
testing
Mother's love—to see to what extremes of behavior I could go, and still have her love. Mother, I think, liked to test people too, for the same reasons. Sometimes it was a subtle form of testing, but it was still there.

But in the end I suspect that Mother's and my habit of testing the strengths of each other's love may have done me some good. I'll mention only one incident. I went to Mother once, wanting to borrow a fairly sizable amount of money. She refused me. Naturally, that made me very angry at the time, and made me eager to do something that would equally anger and disappoint her. That was the way our battles went—what a psychiatrist would call the “dynamic” of our relationship.

In the end, of course, it turned out that it was a good thing that Mother refused me that money. It forced me to go out and do something on my own. I didn't enjoy it much, but perhaps I learned something from doing a thing I did not enjoy. I grew up a little.

Mother taught me not to be lazy, just as she herself was not a lazy woman. In the contest between us, in our lifelong competition with each other, perhaps we both benefited. The only thing I am sure of, though, is that I adored my mother. But I am not sure that she ever knew it.

BABETTE:

What I remember most about Mother was her gaiety and sense of fun, the wonderful energy she threw into giving parties at The Bluff, our home outside Chicago, her love of extravagance and the Grand Gesture. She loved jewelry, for example, and I recall so vividly her wearing, with great flair, the expensive Cartier emeralds which she passed on to me, and which I have had reset in more modern settings. Concerning the emeralds, one anecdote will say it all. Coming home one night from a party at someplace or other, Mother simply slipped off the necklace and earrings and dropped them in one of the chairs in the drawing room. The next morning one of her maids brought them up to Mother's room. She'd found them under the cushion when she plumped up the chair!

That was typically Mother. Devil-may-care!

MOGIE:

As the third-born, and first male, sibling, my early life was, needless to say, dominated by older women—Mother, and my two sisters. Learning to deal with this was, of course, a problem for me.

In order to cope with my fright of the
anima
, as Jung would describe it, I developed a strong and vigorous pursuit of the
animus
, and the intellectuality of scholarship (art, history, literature, and music) became my sublimation. I started to collect, and objects became my obsession. I have, for example, my collection of war games and tin soldiers which, I believe, will handily put the lie to the mythic assumption that in being dominated one cannot dominate. I learned to love and savor the effect of finally being able to control my destiny. Once, I remember my mother asking me why I had decided to collect and write about “things.” I asked her, “What things?” She referred to my soldiers. I replied that this focus was simply my attempt to enrich and enlarge my ability to feel adequate; to show my newly discovered options; to have a hypothetical erection, and that through hypothesis comes apotheosis. She was deeply impressed.

Even though females ruled my life, I had no clear idea of the female psyche. Mother, of course, was of a generation which shunned discussions of the “facts of life,” and, being a very Victorian woman, not to say a prude, Mother was also of that prim upbringing which, in its proper and straitlaced way, would have been shocked by the writings of Freud,
et al
. But it is clear to me that my cognitive development from infancy onward, my classificatory thinking and transitive inference under the
perceived control
of emasculatory females, can only have been direct result of Mother's own male-dominance.
*
Though I never knew my maternal grandfather, his influence ruled her life. Similarly, our father, in Mother's eyes, was a classic, God-like Father Figure. He could do no wrong! How natural that she should redirect her male-dominated life to dominance of me! Fortunately for me, of course, when it became clear to me that the matriarchy in which I grew up, and the Puritan repressions which I inherited from Mother were leaving deep psychic scars, Mother saw to it that I received the needed therapy. And the happy result is my beautiful wife, Christina, and our beautiful baby daughter, Artemis Esther Auerbach, named in Mother's memory.

EATON & CROMWELL, INC.

Executive Offices

February 4, 1983

Mrs. Joan A. McAllister

161 East 68th Street

New York, N.Y. 10021

Mrs. Joseph Klein

1089 South Ocean Boulevard

Palm Beach, Florida 33480

Mr. Martin R. Auerbach

4 Beekman Place

New York, N.Y. 10022

Dear Joan, Babette and Mogie:

Thank you for sending me a copy of the booklet which you prepared in Mother's memory. I read it with interest
.

As you know, I declined to participate in this project, not out of any lack of love or respect for Mother, but because I was opposed to the booklet
as an idea,
and felt that a collection of views of Mother was somehow unfair to her, could not do her justice and that, finally, Mother deserved her privacy
—
and deserved to leave us with her mystery intact
.

Each of you has tried to explain Mother, and I respect your sentiments. But in the end it was the unexplained about her that I treasure most and will carry about with me throughout my life. There are answers to questions about her, in other words, that I do not want to know, explanations about her that I do not want to have
.

For instance, one fact about Mother came to light here only recently. In the process of going through old company records, I discovered that in the early days of Eaton & Cromwell Mother made an important financial contribution to the company. This fact has been overlooked in various corporate histories which the company has put out, but it seems that, without Mother's help, Jacob Auerbach might not have been able to get his enterprise off the ground
—
might not even have become involved with it. What was her role? I don't know, and I don't wish to know, beyond knowing that she chose never to mention it to any of us. Why did she keep this secret? Was it modesty? Or was it the Talmudic tradition which decrees that twice blessed is he who gives in secret? These are more mysteries which I would prefer left unsolved, because if Mother wished to keep a secret from us she would have had a reason
.

Then there was the mystery of our oldest brother, Jacob Auerbach, Jr., who was called Prince, who died young, several years before I was born. Mother never spoke of him and, because I knew that Prince was Mother's secret, I never asked about him
.

Prince's journey on this earth created a mystery about myself which, again, I do not want explained. Joan has said that it seemed to her at times as though she and I had two different sets of parents. My feelings about myself and Mother was that I had two separate selves
—
my own, and that of Prince, whose spiritual guardian I somehow was
.

Somehow I had the impression from Mother that my mission was to replace Prince in her heart
—
that I was needed also to care for Prince, to see that he did the right thing, to see that he never got into trouble, and so on. Where did these feelings come from? I don't
—
and don't want to
—
know
.

And so, throughout Mother's long life, this was what I tried to do. While she was trying to raise us children as best she could, this was what I tried to do to help her. Why I tried, I don't know. I don't want to know. Whether I succeeded, I don't know. Perhaps I did, perhaps I didn't. But it's not a bad mission
—
trying to replace a loved one you never knew in the heart of someone you love, but will never really know
—
if you ask me
.

Love
,

Josh

*
See Gold, Irving L., M.D., “Maternal Influences Affecting Latent Ego Lacunae in Sexually Dysfunctioning Males.”
Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases
, 1973, 35, 639-652.

About the Author

Stephen Birmingham is an American author of more than thirty books. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1932, he graduated from Williams College in 1953 and taught writing at the University of Cincinnati. Birmingham's work focuses on the upper class in America. He's written about the African American elite in
Certain People
and prominent Jewish society in
Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York
,
The Grandees: The Story of America's Sephardic Elite
, and
The Rest of Us: The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews
. His work also encompasses several novels including
The Auerbach Will
,
The LeBaron Secret
,
Shades of Fortune
, and
The Rothman Scandal
, and other nonfiction titles such as
California Rich
,
The Grandes Dames
, and
Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address
. Birmingham lives in southwest Ohio.